Petition: Should Dan Please Share The Story Of The Stolen Points Or Not?

[Baruch]

+1 

[meshugener]

That's your opinion, but not mine.

[Mountain Man]

Hide your kids hide your wife and hide your husbands lol. I haven't seen this in years.

[Achas Veachas]

That's your opinion, but not mine.

-1

+1 

[meshugener]

-1

You got my head spinning trying to figure out what you mean.

[WAM]

Just found this now. Wow, I don't stroll around DDF enough. It's nice scenery!

Now here goes (in no particular order):

+1

That's you're opinion, I strongly disagree.

Well said

-1

That was clearly not intentional! I love it when ppl over-dramatize these threads

Very good point!

It was his thread to begin with, let him be!

+1000!!!

Thanks for the story, happy to hear that you got your points back!

Meshugener

That made me lol

Exactly!

I loved that video, it's in the random video thread somewhere.

(Sorry, I don't have the patience for quoting each post. Sorry if I left something out)

[Buruch]

From DDMS drafts folder from last night before I thought better of posting it.

Learn From The People Who Have Tried To Scam Me

I just finished dealing with a scam artist and I figure that I may as well publicize the story so that people can learn from it.

While we’re at it I’ll share an incident of someone who tried to scam me a couple years ago as well.

Incident 1:

In December 2012 SPG ran a terrific promotion for the S. Regis Bal Harbour, 5 nights for just 60,000 Starpoints. Normally you pay 30K-35K per night at that hotel.

So I grabbed 2 rooms there and brought my mother along as well.  We stayed from Sunday-Friday but she had to go back home on Thursday. Rather than let the room go to waste (the price of 4 nights is the same as 5 with SPG awards) I offered the room free of charge to @DansDeals Twitter followers.

I chatted with the winner and his uncle in the room and thought nothing more of it until I got an $800 folio for minibar charges.

I called the winner and he claimed that in middle of the night he re-gifted the room to someone else and they must have done it.  After several days of getting the raffle winner to take responsibility for what happened, the minibar items were returned and the hotel agreed to refund the charges.

In the past I’ve given away hotel rooms in Maui, a suite in Las Vegas, and several free hotel rooms in Cleveland. Never again.

Lessons learned: 1. Never give away a hotel room as you’ll be on the hook for any damages. 2. No good deed goes unpunished.

Incident 2:

Last Tuesday I noticed a $40 charge from IHG rewards and a $2 charge from an IHG hotel in Florida.

That was odd as I hadn’t logged into my IHG account in months and most definitely was not in Florida.

I logged onto my IHG account and noticed that while a reservation for this winter in Bora Bora was still there, 250K of my unused points had been used on lots of stays that I hadn’t made.

Unfortunately my IHG account is registered to an old hotmail address that I no longer monitor. If I kept on top of that I could have saved a lot of hassle. Inexcusable on my part.

I called up IHG to see what was going on and they gave me 3 names of people that had stayed on points from my account. Let’s call them Reuven, Shimon, and Dovid.

The agent couldn’t tell me how exactly the stays were booked but said they would get back to me the following day.

I searched my inbox for the names I was given and it turned out that “Reuven” attended the seminar I ran in Monsey a few months ago.

So I chatted with the DansDeals official techie and lifesaver BAHayman. He’s from Monsey as well so I asked him if he knows of Reuven. Turns out he does, so he gave him a call.  Reuven said that his friend Dovid had booked several stays for him. He said that Dovid told him that he had an uncle in Canada that worked for IHG and was able to book stays for free. Which is of course a farce.

But he gave us Dovid’s contact information with numbers to reach him in Canada, Israel, NY, and Florida.  I was also able to find his picture and other information via Google. So I made my way through the list and finally reached him in Israel.  As soon as I called him he asked if I was “DansDeals” which I took to mean that he was expecting my call.  He asked if he had “won something.”

After at first feigning ignorance he says that he had a “cousin” who lives in Hartford who booked the stays. And his cousin happened to have the same first name and a nearly identical last name to mine.   Which is interesting because I have a really rare name, I don’t know of anyone else in the world with my exact name.  And his cousin happened to have an email address which was almost identical to my obscure hotmail address.

The odds of that seemed beyond remote and it differed from what Reuven had said, but I was willing to play along.  So Dovid gave me his cousins cell phone number, denied knowing the identity of Shimon, and told me that he loved my site and that its helped him save lots of money.

After hanging up with Dovid I proceeded to call his cousin.  Nobody answered and a quick Google search showed that the phone number wasn’t a cell phone number at all.  In fact Google couldn’t pull up any information about such a person existing in Hartford.

I wrote Dovid asking for his cousin’s physical address but he claimed that “I don’t have a mailing address.”

I wrote an email to this cousin asking if he was actually real and why he used my points. He responded,

    “I am confused of what you are accusing me. My cousin Dovid called me about stays that I had booked for him, which were supposedly done on your account. I had booked him stays on an IHG account of my own. There must be some mistake. I have been an IHG member for three years and have booked several stays for myself and family members in the past. “

Could this all have been a mix-up? I asked for him to jump on a phone call to clarify and he wrote back,

    “I am working now, but would be glad to call you after work. Please don’t make false accusations against me.”

After explaining that I wasn’t accusing but was seeking clarification I again asked for a phone call anytime that day. He never called though I tried a few more times.

So I went onto IHG.com and found out that there is no IHG account listed under this hotmail address that’s mysteriously 1 digit off of mine.
Another lie.

The next day I had emails from both Dovid and his cousin. Dovid plays good cop and writes stuff like “Dan Eleff wants his points back!” while his alleged cousin writes that he “tried to return Dan’s call last night to no avail.”

A lie because I gave him my Google Voice number and no calls were received at all.

He wrote that he booked rooms for Dovid because Dovid let him use his Florida apartment. Then he wrote that

    “someone on Craigslist offered to book Ihg hotel stays for me or clients using his points in exchange for airline points from me. I had him book a couple of hotel stays for you and your friends. I booked a total of 4 stays through this contact”

And now the “cousin” is caught in “his” own lie. First of all there was another stay in July that he casually ignores. But more on that later.

Second he said previously that the stays were from his account and that this was all a mix-up.
Now he claims that the stays were booked from a random craigslist guy.

Of course the odds that this cousin exists with so much information nearly identical to mine but who didn’t book the room from that info, he merely found a guy on Craigslist who must have stolen my points, is now perhaps 1 in a billion.

After that Dovid once again implores his cousin via email to give me a call. Of course no call occurs.

The next day I call up the hotel with the July stay to learn more about Shimon who stayed there on my points. They gave me Shimon’s last name spelled differently than what the IHG rep had told me.

I searched in my inbox and lo and behold Shimon had attended a seminar of mine in Miami. When I asked him what was with the stay he said that Dovid had booked it for him. The same Dovid that claimed not to know Shimon.

Shimon also volunteered that he saw my name on the reservation together with his name and asked Dovid about it. And Dovid told him that there were in fact 2 people with my name and that “this wasn’t DansDeals.”

And where did Shimon know Dovid from? He stayed with him in that hotel in Chicago. And is his study partner.

Armed with this information I called Dovid back on Friday and asked him if he wanted to repay my points directly and I would tell IHG to close the investigation. He still claimed that this was all his “cousins” fault but agreed to repay the points “as soon as he got back home from Israel.”

His tone in the phone call was far more nervous that in our previous phone call. Though he still feigns ignorance throughout and blamed it all on his cousin who just won’t return my darn phone call. And he said that he does know Shimon but that Shimon was lying that he had told him there were 2 people with my name.

I said it had to be now and he said to call him back after shabbos.

Meanwhile I called IHG again to find out the status of their investigation and was told there was still no update and that they would call me when it was finished.

This morning I got another email from Dovid. He spoke with IHG and they already decided they were going to give me back my points.
How he got that information out of them? Who knows.

So I called IHG and indeed they were going to open me a new IHG account at another email address with my points replaced.
They said I’ll still get a call from the fraud team, but all they can say is that the stays were booked over the phone.

Scary.

Lessons learned:1. Always monitor your point balances closely. 2. Make sure your email addresses on file are always at email accounts that you monitor. 3. Beware that people can apparently use your points without even knowing your PIN information. 4. There are sick, sick people out there.

So you're going to BOB? Nice! How many days? I wanted to do the IHG thing for 4 nights at the nicer property there, but as many people found out, availability is very scarce for a whole year. Now I'm not sure it would be worth the hassle - unless there's another ihg property that makes it worthwhile?...

[WAM]

So you're going to BOB? Nice! How many days? I wanted to do the IHG thing for 4 nights at the nicer property there, but as many people found out, availability is very scarce for a whole year. Now I'm not sure it would be worth the hassle - unless there's another ihg property that makes it worthwhile?...

Question for the mods; is there any way to auto condense these uber long quotes?

[Joe4007]

Question for the mods; is there any way to auto condense these uber long quotes?

e.g. Tapatalk.

[WAM]

e.g. Tapatalk.

Yes!

[Achas Veachas]

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/11/thieves-cash-out-rewards-points-accounts/

[ChaimMoskowitz]

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/11/thieves-cash-out-rewards-points-accounts/

http://www.cnbc.com/id/102150175?__source=xfinity|mod&par=xfinity#.

[username]

http://www.usatoday.com/story/todayinthesky/2015/01/12/american-united-thieves-targeted-frequent-flier-accounts/21651365/

[SamKey]

So that's where all my miles went...

[grodnoking]

Wow. I never saw this!
Wow!
Wow!
Wow!

[LoLo]

Not as bad as Dan's story, but..

http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2016/09/19/hotel-reservation-changed/

[pixi]

What do you think I should do?

Shocking story . I would disclose all his info plus a picture you have from him ( I just hope it is indeed a picture of him  and not from someone else )  . I wouldn't let him get away with it .

[pixi]

We were taught (in first grade!)  that being black was a curse of God..

Isn't this something the torah teaches us  ?

We were brainwashed and fooled into being a good frum Jew but not a good person. Recently I asked a big famous Rosh Yeshiva if God wants us to be good humans or good Jews (if we had to choose 1 of the 2) and he replied God want us to be good Jews.

Well the goal of a Jew is to be a good human . a bad human is a bad jew !

[Yammer]

We were taught (in first grade!)  that being black was a curse of God.

Isn't this something the torah teaches us  ?

No.

The Torah tells us that Cham ( who was black ) was cursed by Noach as a punishment for what he did. But being black isn't a curse.

Big difference...

[yesitsme]

wiki please, to much to read